I’ve never managed to get it together for an IMBB? contest before, but I was intrigued by the chosen ingredient of tea and wanted to submit (my first!) entry. Despite the freakish 90 degree weather we’ve been having in Seattle, I also wanted to test out my doufeu. Since my meeting this morning was a block from the Pike Place Market, I went in search of some sort of protein. My favorite meat market, Don & Joe’s Meats is closed on Sundays, so I wandered into the bottom level of the Corner Market Building to find a brand new (6 months old) butcher called Fero’s Meat Market (94-A Pike Street). The bone-in pork shoulder looked so amazing that I couldn’t resist.

Once at home I wondered what I could do with pork, tea and a doufeu. I found some delicious smelling Samovar Blend Tsarina (No. 817) from SpecialTeas and brewed a strong cup. It was smoky and a little bitter so I added a tablespoon of honey and then poured it over the pork roast. I added a little salt, a little pepper and a bay leaf, then filled the lid of my doufeu with ice cubes and slid it into a 300 degree oven for three and a half hours.

The result? An impossibly tender pork roast that fell off the bone; I literally carved it with a spoon and the meat fell into shreds as I ate it. There was a prominent and lovely bay flavor with smokey undertones from the tea.

Kevin, I was wondering the same thing. I’ll have to do some side-by-side comparisons when the weather cools down.

I mean, obviously pork will be pretty tender if you cook it for four hours—no matter what you cook it in. But I was shocked that after that long NONE of the cooking liquid had evaporated and it wasn’t burnt, so I suspect that the doufeu did its job properly and basically self basted the roast the entire time it was in the oven. Which is pretty cool in my book!

Doufeus and dutch ovens are great for that technnique. They baste really well because the little dimples on the lid let the steam condense and drip down off of them evenly. A lot of dutch ovens don’t have dimples or spikes so make sure you’re buying what you want.

Depends on the lid. The classic dutch oven has a flat lid, so that you can pile coals on top as well as underneath to help bake more evenly. Either way, if you’ve got enough braising liquid in there, it shouldn’t be an issue.

Traditionally, they had short legs that would keep the bottom off the coals a bit and you would put a few coals on the lid, too. The handle would let you lift the lid off with the coals intact so you could check on your dish without having to remove them first.

They work great in a regular oven too but a fire place sounds like a cool idea, as long as you using food-friendly coals and not burning pine or one of those waxy logs, of course.

I’ll have to try a dutch oven dinner night in my fireplace, once it dips below 110º around here…